That’s what the vast majority of potential clients consider when selecting a hosting provider. In fact, it should not be the most crucial aspect. When comparing the prices don’t forget that if you buy cheaply, you pay dearly. Choosing the cheapest solution is not the best idea, especially if you develop a serious site to bring you money. Need decent service? come to terms with the fact that 24/7, effective customer support and high-quality hardware cost pretty money, and a $1.99 plan is not likely to include these features. First, see what characteristics are, and only then analyze and compare the cost in every single case.

Not all web hosts are equally suitable for all clients. While some companies offer great shared hosting, but don’t have pretty good solutions for bigger businesses, other providers focus on enterprise web hosting, being inappropriate for some small blogs and single-page sites. Before buying a server, check what the company specializes on, and how it may help you in your particular case. May it supply you with sufficient amount of resources? Will it back you up, if you have a huge site with thousands of visitors? You can also search for reviews and recommendations in the Net: some users may share their experiences and explain what are provider’s drawbacks and merits.

Most customers never consider this factor when making the choice. But when they face severe spam problem, it is the provider to blame. Before buying a server, make sure that the company will provide adequate solutions against this problem. Just ask the provider whether he does anything to prevent spam and which general email practices it has. Remember that e-mail is still a popular means of communication that is susceptible to span and hacker attacks.

This is one of the most important points. Just imagine: your site breaks down for unknown reasons. What shall you do? Right, you will try to address the provider. Will he be able to answer you in live chat, or by phone? And will the team be able to find out what the root of the problem is, and fix it soon? Or you will have to restore the site on your own?

Try to find out what is the reputation for client support. Observer what are the means of communication between you and the assistants: email, live chat, toll free phone, Skype, etc. Are they always available?

This is when you will realize that not all hosting providers are equal. Some don’t care too much about this aspect, leaving the customers face to face with their problems. But there are companies that always back the customers up, keeping in touch whenever clients need to.

In other words, is there anything making this company special? Do they provide anything else except the servers themselves? Or, probably, they have something that makes them more attractive for you. Additional features may include data back-up, domain privacy provision for free, etc. As a rule, every provider has something to offer as a bonus to its servers. So check their offers properly, if you see something important, this is a sign that you should select this or that company.

Take a closer look at your site and figure out the exact features and characteristics it will require. If you are going to start up a serious project like a blog, Internet store or some portal with a huge amount of videos and other heavy content, the cheapest solution won’t do any good. To serve all your needs, you will need a sufficient level of storage space, RAM, bandwidth, processor power and other characteristics. So if you save money on it, most probably, you will have to spend a tremendous amount of time to solve the problems with downtime and other issues.

When considering cheap hosting, examine what features are provided in this case. Will you get enough client support, back-ups, additional domains, etc? Don’t hesitate to call or write them to ask all the questions concerning the products and services. And describe what your site will be like (purpose, specialization, target audience). Be ready to explain, give more detailed description of your project and identify clearly what are your needs – the provider doesn’t know anything about your site yet, but as soon as he gets some information, he will be able to offer exact, optimized solutions.

To learn this information, you will need to make a bit of research on basic server characteristics. You can also ask the provider what types of machines are used. Are these high-quality ones? Or some old, home-made servers are exploited? If the company keeps the information about the servers in secret, it is a bad sign. You have right to know exactly what kind of machine you lease. Hardware is an essential aspect, because it conditions performance of the server and, consequently, of your site.

To get the real understanding of how the company works with clients, you should make a small research. Google for customers’ reviews, or try to find some in social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Just check what the present and former customers tell about the company. Reading the replies, answer the following questions: “Is company’s customer support accessible 24/7? How much does it take to response to a ticket? What do they do, if a client has problems with his site?” Besides, you may ask questions about some particular provider in social media – the answers are more probably to come in less than a day.

Even if you’re a technologically challenged person, there are some things that you will have to do without contacting provider’s customer support: setting FTP account up, adjusting E-mail settings, installing WordPress, and something else. To perform all these tasks easily, you will need a properly designed interface that is intuitive and convenient. Ifyou can’t figure out how to control this or that setting in the control panel provided, overall experience may be spoilt, and work with this hosting may be a problem for you.

The last but not the least is the aspect concerning provider and plan perspectives. What fits well today may be not enough in the future, when in two years your site grows up and requires much more traffic and hardware power.

Any self-respecting web hosting company should look into the future, being able to accommodate huge, fast-developing sites and projects. Analyze which types of host are provided: VPS only, or you will have a possibility to switch to a dedicated server? Changing one provider to another might be a very long, problematic issue, but this difficulty can be avoided, if the company provides the space to grow.

Being aware of all these factors, you can do some research to find the most suitable server and plan provided by an adequate company.